https://www.unicef.org/innocenti/reports/best-interests-child-relation-d...
Highlights
Digital technologies increasingly affect children's rights, bringing both benefits and risks. While the digital environment can support education, socialization, play, and creativity, it can also expose children to cyberbullying, privacy breaches, exploitation, and harmful content. Despite growing regulatory efforts from around the world towards upholding children’s rights in relation to the digital environment, there is no unified framework that ensures ‘the best interests of the child’ is a primary consideration in decisions across related laws and regulations, business practices, and governance structures. Moreover, children's voices are largely absent from decision-making processes about what is in their best interests in a digital world.
This working paper emphasizes the critical necessity of incorporating the best interests of the child principle—a core tenet of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child—into the governance of digital products and services. It highlights the importance of balancing actions and measures that would likely have an impact on children’s rights, such as the right to protection, participation, and privacy – while addressing legal and regulatory gaps and ensuring business responsibilities. The paper presents a review of existing literature on the topic situating the principle within the broader child rights framework, examining the challenges of implementing the principle in the relation to digital environment, evaluating some of the approaches taken by governments and companies, and identifying key legal and regulatory gaps.
The paper outlines several key actions that governments should take: develop child rights-based policies and enhance existing policies with a focus on children’s rights; ensure business responsibility such as through the conducting child rights impact assessments; establish formal mechanisms for meaningful child participation in the governance of digital technologies; and engage in international multistakeholder collaboration to create adaptable and sustainable frameworks that safeguard the rights of all children.
This paper is part of UNICEF's work on children's best interests in a digital world
